Open-weight and OSS are wildly different and the article makes a poor comparison.
What's the incentive for the Chinese labs to continue releasing weights 5 years from now? It's not a stable equilibrium and cannot last.
- The lab spending large sums on research and training does not get the inference revenue to fund those efforts.
- Unlike OSS where a single volunteer can keep a project going, training costs run into the $billions.
- OSS is often a two way street where features and integrations are built that the original author benefits from. Open weight models are largely a one way street because the marginal benefit is so much less than training costs.
In the short term, it means Chinese labs can attract talent and, I suspect, funding from their gov. Similar to every other industry the CCP subsidized to take over.
What's the incentive for the Chinese labs to continue releasing weights 5 years from now?
In the short term it attracts talent and builds brand, but they make little money on inference to support research and training costs. Tin foil hat thinking: it also pulls inference revenue away from Antropic/OpenAI and a financial crises at those organizations improves the relative position of Chinese labs.
Is there a reason to think open-weight models are a stable outcome? Open source software provides a collaboration framework for engineers from many companies to work together. Model weights are mostly a one way street.
In addition to this article, I've seen well thought out assertions from knowledgeable people that Hormuz is far worse than the market thinks and the market just continues not caring.
Maybe they're both right? Horrible things can happen to oil importing economies without derailing the AI build out that's driving the US economy and stock prices.
I think there's a catch-22 where Trump will hold out as long as the market lets him and everyone in the market wants to look through him throwing in the towel.
The professions with the least negotiating power will have the most draconian "oversight". Imagine a cashier graded in real time on how many customers they smile at. Or tracking how many glasses in a restaurant are empty.
This seems like the kind of thing that the right kind of engineer could turn into a lifestyle business. Two mobile apps, two or three browser extensions, a server, and a marketing website. A lot of care for the core security decisions and a bunch of CRUD UIs.
I know I'm being "that guy" so tell me where this gets more complex than I think.
During peak hours Waymo is more expensive than standard uber/lyft - I don't pay attention to black/premium pricing. Off-peak the price can be comparable. I mainly check because my wife prefers it.